Contents

User administration

Adding a user for daily use

Working as root on a Unix/Linux system is dangerous and should be avoided as much as possible. Therefore it is strongly recommended to add a user for day-to-day use.

The groups the user is member of define what activities the user can perform. The following table lists a number of important groups:

Group

Description

audio

Be able to access the audio devices.

cdrom

Be able to directly access optical devices.

floppy

Be able to directly access floppy devices.

games

Be able to play games.

portage

Be able to access portage restricted resources.

usb

Be able to access USB devices.

video

Be able to access video capturing hardware and doing hardware acceleration.

wheel

Be able to use su.

For instance, to create a user called larry who is member of the wheel, users, and audio groups, log in as root first (only root can create users) and run useradd:

Login:root

Password: (Enter the root password)

root #useradd -m -G users,wheel,audio -s /bin/bash larry

root #passwd larry

Password: (Enter the password for larry)
Re-enter password: (Re-enter the password to verify)

If a user ever needs to perform some task as root, they can use su - to temporarily receive root privileges. Another way is to use the sudo package which is, if correctly configured, very secure.

Disk cleanup

Removing tarballs

With the Gentoo installation finished and the system rebooted, if everything has gone well, we can now remove the downloaded stage3 tarball from the hard disk. Remember that they were downloaded to the / directory.

root #rm /stage3-*.tar.bz2*

Where to go from here

Documentation

Not sure where to go from here? There are many paths to explore... Gentoo provides its users with lots of possibilities, and therefore lots of documented (and less documented) features.

Definitely take a look at the next part of the Gentoo Handbook entitled Working with Gentoo which explains how to keep the software up to date, install additional software packages, details on USE flags, the OpenRC init system, etc.

Apart from the handbook, readers should also feel encouraged to explore other corners of the Gentoo wiki to find additional, community-provided documentation. The Gentoo wiki team also offers a Documentation topic overview which lists a selection of wiki articles by category. For instance, it refers to the localization guide to make a system feel more at home (particularly useful for users who speak English as a second language).